Azeri Lawmakers Suggest Pashinian Visit To Baku
• Gevorg Stamboltsian
RFE/RL Armenian Service
Azerbaijan – A session of the Azerbaijani parliament in Baku.
Pro-government members of Azerbaijan’s parliament on Tuesday proposed that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian be officially invited to visit Baku and lambasted the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with him.
Pro-government members of Azerbaijan’s parliament on Tuesday proposed that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian be officially invited to visit Baku and lambasted the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with him.
“We could invite Pashinian to Baku,” one of them, Zahid Oruj, said during a parliament session. “At the same time, the road to Azerbaijan must be closed to all those individuals who are our political enemies and call for sanctions against our country.”
Oruj referred to pro-Armenian U.S. lawmakers and other Western politicians that have accused Azerbaijan of military aggression against Armenia and ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. In In recent months, the Armenian government seems to have stopped backing their calls for sanctions against Baku. Pashinian publicly recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh a year ago.
The Armenian premier is increasingly accused by his political opponents and other critics of making far-reaching concessions to Azerbaijan as well as Turkey for the sake of clinging to power. They have strongly condemned his recent decision to hand over several border areas to Azerbaijan without securing any Azerbaijani territorial concessions in return.
The decision sparked angry protests led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian and essentially welcomed by the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Another Azerbaijani lawmaker, Sahib Aliyev, attacked the ancient church, to which the vast majority of Armenians nominally belong, for “trying to disrupt the border delimitation process.” Aliyev labelled the church as a “den of terrorists.”